Patlabor is Good, yo

I began a quest during the last season of anime to watch some older shows, part to burn through my backlog, part to better understand why and how certain genres came to be how they are, and mostly because the season was pretty slow.  The most recent one that I’m currently watching is Patlabor, a genuine masterpiece that definitely deserves attention.  Not only are the OVAs and movie my favorite Mamoru Oshii projects that I’ve seen (in all fairness there aren’t that many), but even the television series is stand out and great by its own merits.  As such a high-quality product, it’s not much of a wonder as to how Japan has a nationally recognized Patlabor Day, but it is a wonder how it only came to be this year.

For those unaware Patlabor is an older anime that first began as an OVA back in 1988 with a movie serving as its sequel with the much beloved Mamoru Oshii at the helm of both projects.  It got a 47-episode television series directed by Naoyuki Yoshinaga, who learned under Oshii during their time working on Urusei Yatsura together.  Yoshinaga would also direct the second OVA series, while Oshii handled the second movie.  Since then there have been a myriad of live action adaptations and reboots.  We follow a bumbling group of cops in a world where giant robots have become commonplace.  Initially created as tools for heavy industry, labors spread across the entire work force and became interwoven into almost every industry.  As such, crimes involving labors also rose and thus a division of patrol labors was created specifically to deal with them.

If anyone follows me on twitter then you’ll have seen that I’ve pretty much only been uploading various screenshots of Noa Izumi, one of our leads.  There are several reasons beyond the most obvious, that she’s a cute, but because the overall aesthetic of the show is brilliant.  The colors and lighting are pretty much always on point when it comes to setting the mood, and the background art is always pleasing to look at.  Something I had never put forth much conscious thought to until recently is how well do the characters and back grounds meld; do characters look like they belong in this world, and do the back grounds look like they would belong in a world inhabited by these characters?  A very tricky problem to tackle, especially when most back grounds are outsourced.  The main problem to characters and backgrounds not melding is usually one of compositing and color correction as opposed to simply the background artists not doing their job correctly.  Patlabor does of course have moments where the characters stick out like a sore thumb, but these moments are few and far between.  With such fabulous character designs, the entire staff has a lot of brevity in almost every regard.

I don’t say that term as empty praise, I feel like the character design is a very easy way to sum up why I think this show is so great.  Akemi Takada’s designs are absolutely stunning, allowing for extremely varied forms of animation.  Her designs allow for the animators to imbue as much personality as possible to each of the characters and animate differently as needed without ever once being off model.  This is all managed while maintaining a very simple and distinguishable appearance; each character has a different enough silhouette to be distinct and the color palettes are easily recognizable.  This is extremely important for animators as they have to draw each and every frame, meaning that it’s easier for them to add movement and emotion to every single action as well as making it easier to pose them as needed.  Each character has a standard “anime” aesthetic in their simple idle moments, but throughout we see them go from a more realistic, sharp and serious appearance, to a cartoony, round and goofy appearance without it feeling awkward or out of place.  All this while managing to maintain a clear sense of individuality and more than enough personality to gleam from a single glance.  Truly a difficult feat, to say the least.

A feat that is indicative of something much larger that the show eloquently handles:  Its narrative and tone.  With the setting as it is, the episodic nature of the show works extremely well and it takes the same approach to development and progression as Konosuba; which is that all the momentum pushing the plot forward comes from character interactions as opposed to some event or calling.  The episodic nature also allows it to explore various themes, tones, stories and even genres.  Saying it’s a mecha does not do it justice.  Saying it’s a crime drama does not do it justice.  Saying it’s a slice of life does not do it justice.  Patlabor is all of these things and so much more, sometimes in the same episode.  The biggest strength of the show for me is that the narrative and tone are just as flexible as the character designs themselves.  The show fully embraces the cheese that is a 26-foot-tall giant robot using a giant revolver, leading to some exceptionally funny moments, even to the point that there’s a kaiju episode in the OVA.  Yet, with this clearly ridiculous premise, you don’t bat an eye when terrorists, conspiracies, civil war, revolution and a meta narrative on the current state (at the time) of Japan and the proliferation of weapons enter the story.  Much the same as Takada laboriously created designs that can fit into every single situation, the narrative, art, layouts and animators carefully put them into every single situation.

With all these gears spinning together we end up with… well… Patlabor.  Patlabor can be anything to anyone, which is one of the defining features of the truly great.  One of the best parts of shows like Kyousougiga, Flip Flappers and FLCL is that they all have a duality to them and are only as deep as you want them to be; you can watch each and every one of those shows for the spectacle alone, or you could watch them for the narrative weight and symbolism that each scene carries.  Patlabor easily falls into this category.  Patlabor has carved out a well-deserved place in anime history by being completely unafraid to fully embrace its ridiculousness while offering solid character development and progression along with several meta narrative statements on society and the world at large.

Thanks for reading, friends.  This one is a bit shorter than usual but I felt if I went on anymore with it then it would just end up bloated.  I wanted to get this one out of the way so I could get into the topic of watching older or influential anime through a modern lens.